35: When Design Thinking is CMO Thinking

The goal of Renegade Thinkers Unite is to present you with fresh approaches to age old problems — and this episode does that in spades with guest Jerome Nadel, CMO of Rambus. Nadel will introduce you to the idea of design-led marketing and how rather than just accepting the products as given, CMOs can help drive product development such that the marketing is baked into the outcome. And as Nadel notes, better products are a whole lot easier to sell!  Here's a sample from Jerome's interview with RTU host Drew Neisser: Drew: When did user experience and design thinking really take off? Jerome: As we came into the 2000, the notion of differentiation through user experience became sort of the mantra for product success. So, as we go deeper in the conversation, what I'll suggest is the difference between user experience and marketing or design-led marketing are really minimal. What user experience professionals focus on is the upstream concepting of, what's the narrative that makes product great? Not just in terms of its features but how should it work and how does it support use cases? Often what marketers are focused on is telling stories about why products are great. If you connect the stories that made the product great with the stories that reinforce and articulate their greatness, you have beginning to end of full marketing. Ironically Drew, I don't think that such a radical construct but I think it's not embraced to the extent that it should be in the profession that we share.